


Our Love Will Never Be Scarce

by dome_epais



Category: Razia's Shadow
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:38:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dome_epais/pseuds/dome_epais
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Pallis grows into the Dark, Adakias grows out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Love Will Never Be Scarce

Pallis loitered in the doorway to his brother’s room. Sound didn’t carry in the thick, still air, but Pallis could imagine Adakias’ words; he was miming Ahrima tumbling the Lamps from their Pedestals. Pallis recognized his brother’s distaste for the destruction, for all of this section of the myth, writ clear on his face.

Pallis shrugged himself away from the doorjamb, weight shifting from toes to heels, settling. He smiled and said, “Brother,” flat, soft.

Adakias stuttered to a stop and flushed with embarrassment. He grinned at Pallis tentatively, because he knew how unpredictable Pallis could be.

Tonight, Pallis knew the mood to indulge his brother. He stepped close until his hand rested on his brother’s shoulder, squeezed. “You were to the Lamps,” he reminded Adakias.

The younger beamed and said, “You can be Toba the Tura!”

Pallis put on his condemning voice, as he had for years, telling this bedtime story. He had seven years already when Adakias was born; he was nearly double that, now. He had practice.

“ _So, you’re Ahrima_ ,” Pallis sang, “ _collusive dreamer._ ”

Adakias’ face fell. “Oh.”

Pallis moved closer. “Brother?”

“Dreamer.” Adakias’ mouth twisted and he glanced around his room. Child’s drawings of spiders, of a bright utopia on the far side of the farthest mountain. “They call me that.”

“Well,” Pallis extemporized.

What might he say? This was the world; solid and real in the lungs, dragging on the knees. Its truth mired Pallis, some days, but he would grow into the strength to face it, just as he now grew into his father’s crown.

Adakias wrung his hands miserably and huddled closer to his brother.

Pallis embraced him, gathered him closer. “You’re a child yet, Adakias. You won’t dream forever.”

Adakias would grow out of this, just as Pallis had. 

\----

Pallis was four years old. He had never considered the possibility of a brother. But he could almost grasp what destiny meant, and he could almost imagine Light.

\----

“Now,” Adakias said, “you be O the Scientist.”

“Be quiet!” Pallis snapped. His preparations and readings loomed over him, a gathering storm.

“Brother--” Adakias whimpered.

“No!” Pallis cried, raising his hand to warn his brother away. “No more stories, brother! No dreams and no songs. Never again.”

Adakias slunk away, five years old and very small and wrenching a part of Pallis as he went.

Pallis was twelve years old. He couldn’t afford to believe in impossible things.

\----

Adakias sighed. “He’s sour and ill-made.”

Pallis touched his brother’s hair, too long and tucked over his ears. He said, “He had dark, harmful reactions, but he was not bad in entirety.”

“But he burned the world. He turned the earth with salt and brought the ash upon us.” Adakias had nine years and an unwillingness to understand.

“He loved Nidria sincerely.” The elder lay back on the hard-packed dirt, let the thick silence of a desolate land roll over him. “He could not be totally evil. Love is a good and clean thing.”

Adakias dug, fingernails scrabbling for something to occupy them. He observed softly, “Love seems scarce here. Compared to O the Scientist’s world of Light.”

“You have me,” Pallis reminded his brother. “Our love will never be scarce.”

\----

“ _Place your hand on mine_ ,” Adakias demanded. Three years old and regal with it.

Pallis set their palms together. He always volunteered to put his brother to bed, and Adakias always asked to hear of Holy the Sea and the Divided Terrene, the Oracle’s prophecy.

No one else indulged him nearly every time. 

\----

“Brother,” Adakias greeted.

Pallis looked away from the streaky grey leaves of the Crown’s somber gardens.

“Brother?” the younger asked, now.

Pallis was twenty years old, but it meant nothing. He was the heir; still caught in the gap between child and adult, in their father’s eyes.

Pallis said, “Very well.” He had time for daydreams, at the moment. “Lie with me first.”

Adakias sank into his brother gratefully, fitting snug and unfamiliar to Pallis’ bones. He waited until Pallis nearly slept. “You may be Nidria, if you want.”

Pallis’ hand soothed his brother’s spine. He knew how much Adakias disliked the role of Ahrima; the most gifted seraph’s frustration and jealousy repelled him.

“No,” Pallis said. “I’ll play Ahrima. I’m in the mood for it today, anyway.”

\----

“ _What a tragic mess,_ ” Adakias hummed to himself, “ _you fools have made of this._ ”

He had a persistent habit of using the refrain to pick out the heartache of situations; to passively comment of the downturn of things. Pallis had cautioned him before.

Pallis had _warned_ him.

Singing it now, singing it _now_. Now, as the brothers climbed the long path from the cemetery to the Crown’s home. As they buried their mother.

Pallis struck his brother, knuckles to mouth, shared blood across the back of Pallis’ hand.

Adakias sprawled at his brother’s feet, eyelids fluttering, gasping and weeping. He said, “Pallis, Pallis. My brother. Please.”

“Stop it now,” Pallis demanded. He swooped down and dragged his brother up by the collar, skin too warm. “You must stop it, Adakias. That tired worn-thin fantasy is over. Never speak of it again.”

Adakias was seventeen years old. In seven days, he would begin to talk of a journey, begin to plan and pace.

Here, on this path, dressed in their mourning best, Adakias surged up and kissed Pallis, bit his lips. Desperately promised to try the impossible.

\----

Pallis stood at the window, back ramrod straight and chin high. From this vantage point, the Crown overlooked the world; slate grey and flaking like shale, layered as far as the eye could see. Pallis would rule this, someday.

Much closer, Adakias paced the walk under Pallis’ perch. He was a bundle of sticks, knees and elbows and sharp corners. He was fifteen years old, and he didn’t fit together right.

Pallis could see his mouth moving over fast familiar words. He recognized aborted motions, ingrained and rote-memorized. The elder stood and watched until Adakias tired of his game and came inside. Until Adakias touched his elbow.

“Do you sometimes,” Adakias started anxiously. “Does the world seem too small, sometimes?”

“Too heavy, maybe,” Pallis answered.

“Oh.” Adakias was quiet a few moments, thoughtfully following his brother’s gaze. “For me, it’s too light. Fragile. I’m not-- here.” He laughed desperately and sang, “ _Dream with your eyes closed._ ”

Pallis turned in a flurry, hands grabbing roughly at his brother’s hair, forcing their brows together. “Do you feel this? Brother. No. Do you hear me? You are here and this is real, because there is nowhere and nothing else for you if not this.”

The younger whined in his throat, clutching at his older brother’s waist, clinging. He begged, “Tell me, brother. Tell me how to accept this as my place when I feel that I can do so much more.” 

“Just do what I did,” Pallis said. “Don’t allow dreams to consume you.”

He meant; Let truth defeat you.

\----

“ _One day the strands will mend,_ ” Pallis sang. Eight years old, on tiptoes over his brother’s cradle. “ _All the torn seems and frayed ends._ ”

He still believed. That young, he still believed.

\----

Pallis touched Adakias, hands skimming and holding him in place.

They were twenty-three and sixteen. Pallis couldn’t fathom his brother’s restlessness.

Adakias curled into him and offered, “ _Place your hand on mine._ ”

Palm to palm.

\----

“Ahrima was dependent upon Nidria,” Adakias said. They had ranged far afield this day; they sat side-by-side on a tree’s bare branch, just in sight of the farthest mountain’s peak.

“Perhaps,” Pallis answered.

“He loved her because she indulged his selfish fantasies,” the younger bit out, frustrated. “It wasn’t true.”

“It was destined.”

Adakias huffed; usually the word destiny ensured his acceptance. He said, “But it wasn’t right.”

Pallis rested his fingers on the back of his brother’s neck. It had been one month since they started whatever it was they were doing.

Pallis said, “No. Perhaps it wasn’t right. But she loved him, too.”

\----

Adakias, bright-eyed and wondering, breathed, “They sewed the world, brother. Out of nothing.”

“Yes,” Pallis said, absorbed in his studies.

“ _I’m a slave to the sight,_ ” the younger sang. “ _A slave to your eyes._ ”

“Choose carefully to whom you sing those words,” Pallis cautioned offhandedly. He was seventeen, and he had never sung those kinds of words to anyone but his brother.

“But I have,” the younger pouted.

\----

Adakias sang the Flood of the Lamps all in one breath. It was his favorite part of the Divided Terrene legend. “ _Flood it through my blood, breathe it through my lungs, give us all your love,_ ” with his face cracked and splitting from wanting the Light so badly.

Pallis averted his eyes, wished he didn’t know the draw.

\----

“Did you ever?” Adakias asked his brother. They were twenty-five and eighteen. They were tangled up together, skin to skin, palm to palm. Wearing a film of their sour love.

“I believed,” Pallis admitted. “I thought, once, of destiny, of my path in it. I had an inkling-- but it was faint, and long ago. I’ve matured.”

“I never grew out of it,” the younger said with some pride. “I never will. It’s so steady and sure, this pull, this-- Brother, listen.” Very seriously, Adakias kissed his brother long and longing. “I’m going to leave. I’m going to cross the mountains.”

Pallis’ gut tensed and flooded with dread. He protested weakly, “There is nothing beyond the mountains. You will die.”

“I have to try,” Adakias said. “I feel it. This is my truth. This is what I have to do.”

Pallis wanted to sing: Inside her lock he will turn the key.

He said, “If the myth is true, about the Light and the Dark…”

His brother promised, “I’ll return, someday. I’ll show you the Light, brother. We’ll meet again, I’m sure of it.”

“I’m sure of it, as well,” Pallis said, sick.

Here ended their ill-made love, shuffled off for two destined hearts.

\----

“If you elope, I’ll hunt you down,” Pallis cried to his brother’s back. 

Adakias turned to walk backwards for a while and called back, “Don’t you ever feel like you’ve been destined for something bigger than your skin?”

Once he was out of sight, climbing the mountain, Pallis screamed with all his might, “You’ll never come back for me!”

(In this moment, never before or after, Pallis felt capable of fulfilling his promise; of hunting his younger brother like a dog and destroying him for destroying Pallis first.)

Quieter, defeated: “What a splendid mess we’ve made of this.”

Then, silent: “My puzzle lay complete but now I have a missing piece.”

\----

Too soon, too horribly soon, Adakias offered his palm to his brother and said, “Place your hand on mine one last time.”

The Light warmed Pallis’ neck, and he lost everything.


End file.
